by Communion: The Female Search for Love was as much an eye-opener as bell hooks’ other works. Every time I start reading a bell hooks piece for the first time (and the day is coming when I will run out of opportunities to have this experience), I have a moment of reckoning with myself. I realize that I am about to learn and grow and have my worldview questioned in ways that might be uncomfortable, and I take a deep breath and dive in. This piece of work hit me especially hard for me. At one point I started highlighting and before I knew it I had been transfixed for a page and a half, marking it all out for a later me to come back to.
In this book, bell hooks touches briefly on her experience with mental illness, something that startled me and touched me deeply because, until this work of hers, I had imagined her as a goddess, unbreakable and without flaw or vulnerability. Utterly different from me in every way. And yet, here she was, in black and white, describing symptoms that I’d been living with for years. I breathed air that was lighter and sweeter than before.
“It reminded me of the occasions in therapy with my longtime partner when he would say that I always encouraged him to talk about his feelings, but when he did, everything he shared upset me. This made him want to remain silent. What he shared usually exposed that he was not the person I thought he was- that his values, ethics, and beliefs were radically different from mine…Much of what men have to say would be a turn off, so no wonder many male seducers learn to keep their thoughts to themselves, the better to manipulate and con their female admirers.”
“Frequently, men are not particularly negative when asked to speak about their feelings. They simply respond by saying, “I don’t know the answer.” This is a passive form of control, for it closes down all discussion.”
“Women, more so than men, spend an astounding amount of money to learn about the nature of intimacy, to learn ways to make relationships work. Yet we have erected no schools of love, no think tanks that help us understand love better, nor have we created a diverse, large body of insightful writing on the subject. The time has come for women who are genuinely and passionately concerned with love to insist that love be valued in our culture.”
“Being alone and celibate gave me the psychic space to confront myself and examine my relationship to intimacy. Soon it was obvious that I had chosen partners who were not particularly ‘into’ intimacy, because then I had never had to make a leap of faith, to trust, or to risk. Being with men who were not interested in offering abiding closeness meant that I never really had to be close.”
“Often girls feel deeply cared about as small children but then find as we develop willpower and independent thought that the world stops affirming us, that we are seen as unlovable.”
“There are so many women I talked with who, like me, never thought about midlife, so many of us who thought we would be dead before the age of thirty. Our reasons for thinking this were rooted in tremendous fears about growing up, about becoming grown women. We wanted to be girls forever. As girls we felt we had power. We were strong and fierce and sure of ourselves.”
